Clément Oudart

Genreading and Underwriting:

A Few Soundings and Probes into Duncan’s Ground Work

This piece is about 18 printed pages long.

1. Underwriting

paragraph 1

What names or signatures “underwrite the grand design” (GW 272)?

2

By what key texts and to what extent is Ground Work under-written?

3

A few days before giving a brief paper with the intriguing title of “Son
écrit d’un texte parlé” at a “French
Theory” colloquium held on 5-8 May 1977 in Belgium, Robert Duncan wrote
his Australian pal and fellow-poet Chris Edwards. The conference would feature such
notable speakers as “the theorist Derrida (at present a rage in American
circles)” and some of the most vocal members of “the Change
group” and the Tel Quel circle. With a note of urgency in his remark,
Duncan pointed out that besides an essential “kindred strain,
[...] the art needs too the foundational — to address the
‘ground’ — and the declaration and carrying through of an
architecture.”[1] Duncan’s
constant grappling with the origin of creation (poiesis), his perpetual attempt
to find, found, and sound the ground(s) of his restless poetic practice is
embedded in his (at times abyssal) grounding in intertextuality. After
considering Transmissions, Gleanings and The Ground, Duncan soon decided to
entitle Ground Work his ultimate work in progress, which is predicated upon a
process of go-between best expressed as “reading-writing,” a
physical scriptuary practice mostly recorded in the author’s (circa)
eighty-five notebooks made up of reading notes, first drafts, essays and lectures, phonetic drills and drawings, notes in French and Greek, dream data and travelling expenses along with the odd “dear
diary” entry.[2] In the wake of
Joyce’s and Pound’s groundbreaking late works, Duncan’s
primarily serial and derivational late poetry demands not only painstaking
critical assessments but also archival and genetic investigations into the
works’ avant-texte. Coined by Jean Bellemin-Noël (Le Texte et
l’avant-texte, 1972), this basic concept for modern genetic criticism
suggests that the reconstruction of the writing process hinges on the study of
“the operations by which, in order to form itself, something transformed
itself, all the while forming that locus of transformation of meaning that we
call a text” (quoted in Genetic Criticism 46). As explain Deppman, Ferrer
and Groden, it also emphasizes the “critical construction” of the
gathering of the “noncanonical texts,” namely drafts, notebooks,
typescripts, correspondance etc. As a late modernist himself (still surfing on
the first wave) and indefatigable reader of his modernist chrestomathy (with texts by Pound, Williams and H.D., as well as Stein, Joyce and the French symbolists, among others), my sense is that Duncan’s “reading-writing and then writing
reading” process – as a way to work the ground of tradition as well
as ground his own work in language – gave rise to the poetics of an
extraordinarily creative “genreader” (Rabaté
196).[3] As there is only room here
for a few soundings and probes into this modernist ground-work, the handful of Passages and poems chosen here all emerge from one specific ground, crucial to Duncan’s ultimate series, that of the symbolist (pre-)history of modernism.

2. Ground/Work

4

In an attempt to circumscribe the field of
“traditional” metaphysics and replace it with his ontology of being,
Heidegger encountered repeatedly der Satz vom Grund, the principle of reason, which adumbrates Leibniz’s reply to his baffling fundamental question:
“Why is there something rather than nothing?” Taking his cue from
Leibniz, Heidegger is hopeful to manage his ontological leap (another meaning of
Satz) above or beyond the ground (or its potential absence, i.e. Ab-grund or
abyss) through a meticulous inquiry into the polysemic resourcefulness of the
word Grund.[3a] In asking what he holds to be the broadest, the deepest and most
fundamental question (“Why are there beings rather than nothing?”),
Heidegger invokes the “ground” as reason and meaning, as the site
for the commingling of foundation and substratum, all the while underscoring the
originary dimension consubstantial to the notion of primal foundation:
“Why are there beings at all...? Why – that is, what is the ground?
From what ground do beings come? On what ground do beings stand? To what ground
do beings go? [zu Grunde gehen (fig.): to be ruined] (Introduction to Metaphysics 3).[4] The philosopher’s insight
into this notion seems to “rhyme” with Duncan’s Ground Work, a
word whose full philosophical (and poetic) possibilities Duncan would in turn
re-work throughout his later writing life.

5

To seek the ground:
this means to get to the bottom [ergründen]. What is put into question
comes into relation with a ground. But because we are questioning, it remains an
open question whether the ground is a truly grounding, foundation-effecting,
originary ground [Ur-grund]; whether the ground refuses to provide a foundation,
and so is an abyss [Ab-grund]; or whether the ground is neither one nor the
other, but merely offers the perhaps necessary illusion of a foundation and is
thus an un-ground [Un-grund]. [...] This why-question does not just skim the
surface, but presses into the domains that lie “at the ground”
[“zu-grunde” liegend], even pressing into the
ultimate, to the limit; the question is turned away from all surface and
shallowness, striving for depth; as the broadest, it is at the same time the
deepest of the deep questions. (IM 3-4)

6

Duncan’s primarily
serial and intertextual writings entertain more than a merely fortuitous
relation with Heidegger’s ontological inquiry. Digging into Duncan’s
palimpsestic texts, it becomes clear that the “Ground Work” is
fraught with a tension between Ur-grund, Ab-grund and Un-grund. Consequently,
the “genetic reader” in search of the primordial sub- or ur-text is
faced not only with exploring the textual groundwork but also the potential risk
of encountering groundlessness, namely of arriving at a textual ground which in
turn proves to be chimerical, and only one stage of an infinite intertextuality.
Inquiring into Ground Work’s groundwork entails running this risk. My
concern is not so much to provide solid grounds for the
“origins” of Duncan’s poems. Rather, in an attempt to
understand his conception of writing as laying foundations, I am only aiming at
laying bare and exhibiting little patches of ground or layers of intertext as a
reconstruction of the “reeling and writhing” process (Duncan loved
Lewis Carroll).

7

Duncan rarely discusses
Heidegger[5] — or
“continental thought” in general — and when he does, it
usually offers him an opportunity for rebuttal, as in the letters to Chris
Edwards following his immersion in the French intellectual circles at
theory’s high tide in May 1977 or as in this notebook entry:

8

Nov 10, 1982
Before the War : Preface, The Ground.

It is strange that we may take reading-writing and then
writing reading in turn to be a ground of being. I mean to touch in the
word — Being — the resonance of Heidegger’s contemplations and
speculations; and still, back of the chord I would sound, the over-there vacuity
of the term. For I am not a philosopher, I have not the earnest of the calling.
Philosophies, religions or linguistics, enter my work as mountains, lovers, the
sea, trees, weathers, household, heart, recalls and announcements, histories and
reflections of good and evil, come into its courses: for the lure of a creative
potentiality. A poetry, an alliance or allegiance to the deep-going transcendant
plurality of processes I see.

9

Surely, in pointing to the gaping “over-there vacuity” that he sees at the core of Heidegger’s theoria (contemplation), Duncan’s reference to Heidegger’s ontology as “a mere locution, an indeterminate meaning, intangible as a vapor,” was meant “in a purely dismissive sense” (IM 42). Interestingly (and unwittingly?), the poet adopts a distinctly Nietzschean stance which is integrated in — and recuperated by — Heidegger’s demonstration, as he seeks to show the full implication of this emptiness, ultimately attributed to the forgetfulness or oblivion of being in the history of metaphysics (IM 27).[5a] As a mere “seeker after
origins” and “student of a poetics” (notorious
self-definitions) Duncan nonetheless shares with Heidegger (and Whitehead for
that matter) a common ground — namely that of Pre-Socratic philosophy. In
his letter from 31 May 1978, Duncan emphasizes: “I am, after all, a poet
not a responsible philosopher. If I search Heraklitus, Empedocles, Parmenides it
is because I sense some revelation of poetry there. Whitehead and Heidegger
write like poets.” On 27 September 1978, the poet would return to his
initially frustrated dismissal of ontology or theory “as such,” in a
more nuanced conjunction of philosophy and poetics: “Did I overstate in
order only to affirm what a primary business Poetry is in its own right?
[...] I do after all read and reread James, Whitehead and
Heidegger as sources not only of inspiration but of taking measure of concepts
and of how I see the world.”

10

The phrase “ground of
being” appears namely in Heidegger’s commentary on the schema of the
four delimitations of being. Placing “thinking” (the most
fundamental of the four distinctions) beneath “being,” he adds:
“This indicates that thought is the sustaining and determining ground of
being” (IM Manheim 196); Fried and Polt translate this way: “This
indicates that thinking becomes the ground that sustains and determines
Being” (IM 210). After which Heidegger recapitulates: “Over against
thought [being] is the underlying, the already-there” (IM
Manheim 202); Fried and Polt: “Being, in contradistinction to thinking, is
what lies at the basis, the present-at-hand” (IM 216). Being is ultimately
understood in the sense of ousia: constant or enduring presence.

11

Thinking, and by extension Duncan’s poetic practice as
“reading-writing and then writing reading,” creates the condition
(ground) for a return to the underlying and enduring
“already-thereness” (being). The poetic (creative) activity is seen
as the reworking of the ground of an underlying, already-there enduring
presence: that of “other” texts. This is conveyed by poems that are
rooted in a multilayered intertextuality, in the “already-thereness”
of the hypertext and by extension of the language structure. As garantor of an
ontic-ontological difference, the poetic ground-work also creates the
possibility for otherness to emerge. Let us venture into this “foreign field” (Letter to Chris Edwards) inasmuch as it is the ineffable topos from which Duncan writes.[6] His dialogue (often a polylogue) with the other poets “takes place” in the non-ground of the inter-text, the interlingual gap, which may be conceived as a communal site of relations.[6a]

3. “the old trails/leading to ruins”

12

In “Ancient Reveries and Declamations/Passages
32” Duncan’s poetics of quotation turns into a generative machine as
the hypertext seems to set the whole poem in motion. Opening on quotes from
“John Adams, marginalia to Court de Gébelin’s Monde
primitif,” a late XVIIIth century encyclopedic work about the origins of
language and myth, the Passage proceeds with a quote from John Adams’s
notorious atheist cry in 1816:

13

“Let the human Mind loose!
It must be loose!

It will be
loose!”

Here one needs the name, the
Spanish Jesús, or Iacchus

Iésus. Say no more
than the sound of the rime leads back
from the American cry
“Let the human Mind loose!” to theJesús,
Bridegroom of Saint John of the Cross, or to the
French /y/ of
Iacchus Iésus in Gerard de Nerval’s ancient
theogony
“parée de noms et d’attributs nouveaux”. (GW
19)

14

The poem indulges in a self-referential comment on the phonemic
shift at work here, in keeping with the Poundian tone-leading of vowels.
Iacchus-Iésus appears in Nerval’s works, namely in his account of
the life of Quintus Aucler in his portrait gallery of Enlightenment mystics and
excentrics, Les Illuminés (The Illuminati). Better known in France under the name of
Christ, explains Nerval, Iacchus-Iésus is linked to the mysteries of
Eleusis in Egyptian mysticism (OC II: 1158), and which are key to Pound’s
mysticism as shown by Leon Surette. Duncan’s translation of Nerval’s mystic sonnets “Les
Chimères” (first published in the Duncan special issue of Audit/Poetry in
1967) was already part of an ongoing series of close readings of his poetry and
prose, as passages from “The H.D. Book” (1961) or “Passages
32” (1969) testify.[7]
Duncan’s quote (“parée de noms et d’attributs
nouveaux”) was drawn from “Isis,” the fifth short story of
the 1854 volume Les Filles du feu (The Daughters of Fire), which also comprised
the sonnets of “The Chimeras” (OC III: 622)

As a
lexical insert this citational fragment fulfills a function pertaining to a
modernist poetics of quotation reminiscent of Eliot and Pound. Indeed, we may
think of “Le prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie” from
“El Desdichado,” the most legendary of the Chimères
originally published at the end of Les Filles du feu. Nerval’s
alexandrine appears precisely among the last lines of Eliot’s The Waste Land,
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins” and which Pound
radically edited (WL 69). Coming full circle in this citational periplum, the
line is turned into a scathing onslaught on Eliot at the onset of Canto VIII:
“These fragments you have shelved (shored)./‘Slut!’
‘Bitch!’ Truth and Calliope/Slanging each other sous les
lauriers” (C 28). Duncan’s Nerval, therefore, does not come without
strings attached. In following this lead, the reader enters a dizzying
“circle of Signators” (GW 249), as he is caught in the vortex of
intertexual poetics. Moreover, the last two pages of Duncan’s Passage are
revealed to be thoroughly underlied — and in a sense underwritten — by
Nerval’s short story on the Egyptian goddess Isis, and also by the
poignant account of Nerval’s chimerical wonderings and real or imaginary
stealth among the ruins of the Temple. The palimpsestic layering takes on a new
twist as it is combined with a twofold translation. Thus the French poet’s
prose resurfaces through a range of textual strategies. First, the Nervalian
under-writing emerges in a plaited quotation/translation from section III of
“Isis” (GW 21; cf. OC III: 617):

The underlying text
looms anew through a rewriting of the original, where Duncan replaces
Nerval’s “almost religious impression upon [his]
second viewing of the Temple of Isis in Pompeii” (OC III: 617), and the
poet’s subsequent detailed reconstruction of his entrance into the Isiac
sanctuary, with his own entrance into “the text itself where
[he] came to it” (GW 21).

19

It is worth noting
that Nerval’s depiction of the architectural beauty of the Temple of Isis
is immediately preceded by a disclaimer at the beginning of this section of
“Isis,” where the poet — somewhat ironically — warns against
the risk of spoiling the first impression inspired by monuments by dint of
reading erudite accounts in history books (cf. OC III: 617):

20

Perhaps by reading too much beforehand, one risks spoiling
one’s first impression of celebrated places. I had visited the Orient with
nothing but the memories, already lazy, of my classical education. (A
133)[9]

21

Moreover,
Nerval’s reconstruction of Isis — a reversal of the myth where Isis
gathers the limbs of Osiris (to paraphrase Pound’s serial essay published
in The New Age) — is “construed” in architectural terms in the
following passage, where the poet draws a distinct parallel between the
re-erection of the ancient Temple after an earthquake and his own attempt to
re-member the nightly ceremony:

22

I do not know if any of the three
statues of Isis in the Naples museum was found on this same spot, but I had
admired them the day before, and joining to them the recollection of the two
paintings, nothing prevented me from reconstructing in my mind the whole scene
of the evening ceremony. (A
134-135)[10]

23

Duncan
conceals the next quote in his translation of Nerval’s depiction of the
riches from the Temple housed in the Museum of Naples (starting with “A
gilded Venus, a Bacchus, numerous
Hermes”).[11] This passage is
in turn intertwined with a quoted fragment drawn from the description of the sun
and moon casting a dim, eerie light over the ruins of the Temple at dusk
(“ces deux astres qu’on avait longtemps adorés dans ce temple
sous les noms d’Osiris et d’Isis,” OC III: 618). Finally, the
poem switches back to an unmarked translation until the end (“Child of a
century...”), only departing from the original source on two occasions. By
keeping the word “ensemble,” which is found in English in other
contexts (musical, for instance), Duncan leaves in a trace of the original, a
word with a foreign taste, possibly hinting at an underlying textual ground.
Secondly, he performs another transformation of the Ur-text by substituting
“the scientists” for “les philosophes” in the closing
lines of the poem:

24

will I find myself traind to believe
everything,
as our fathers, the scientists, have been
traind to
deny? (GW 22)[12]

25

That “Isis” itself — which we may be tempted to
view as the Urgrund — is a collage of texts should be borne in mind. In
spite of Nerval’s disavowal, it is well-known that the poet supplemented
his fantasized memory snatches with extensive readings. In truth, a translation
of German archeologist C. A. Böttiger’s “Die Isis-Vesper”
makes up the end of section I and all of section II of the final version of
“Isis.” Furthermore, a passage from book XI of Apuleius’s The
Golden Ass, one of Nerval’s (and Duncan’s) favorite books, makes up
the third through fifth paragraphs of the fourth section, those immediately
preceding Duncan’s snatched fragment from Nerval’s development on
the Greeks’ appropriation of the ancient Egyptian theogony. In both cases,
what could be mistaken as a primal ground surrepticiously caves in under genetic
scrutiny. What’s more, in the two examined types of
intertext — Eliot’s conspicuous use of Nerval and Nerval’s
unavowed (even disavowed) resort to Apuleius — Duncan, who knew the source
texts well, surely knew where his ground was. Nerval’s unsignaled use of
Apuleius, however, is likely to remain unnoticed by most readers as it is
imperceptibly woven into the poet’s style. Besides, Duncan’s
treacherous, half-said handling of quotations and translations — which
partly turns the intertextual clues into red herrings — may induce unwary
critics to quote him when they are in fact unwittingly quoting Duncan quoting
Nerval. [13]

4. “the phantom begotten of Idumaean Night”

26

Just as “Passages 32” is underlied by Nerval’s “Isis,”
Duncan’s “An Interlude of Winter Light” (1975) is underwritten
by Mallarmé, whose “Don du poème” laid the groundwork
for Duncan’s poem. In contrast, however, the reference to both author and
text is explicit. Mallarmé’s underwriting of Duncan’s poem
does not simply consist in providing spectral fragments and ruins of
“ghostwriting”[14] in
the textual substratum of the poem, as was the case with the Nerval Passage, but
in offering the warranty of a proper name — the hallmark of a
“signator.” Interestingly, Duncan’s faintly surreal poem takes
on a burlesque dimension as the anecdote of the poem’s genesis unfolds
under the reader’s bemused gaze. Mallarmé’s intrusion onto
the scene of writing is carefully staged through Duncan’s account as he is
disturbed by “the old crone sitting next to [him]”
while attending Maurice Béjart’s mise en scène of Pli selon
pli,[15] the lyric-symphonic piece
that Pierre Boulez dubbed his “portrait of Mallarmé” and in
which the composer quotes Mallarmé’s “Don.” In an
attempt to translate onto the poetic space Duncan’s account of his
neighbor’s untimely questions during the Béjart Ballet performance
(“‘What does ‘Idumaean’ mean?’” leading to
“‘Who is the child of Idumaean Night?’” GW 153), the
poem becomes interspersed with Duncan’s asides following his own dire
confession (“I do not know”) and his subsequently misleading
inklings: “It has to do with Mount Ida,” suggests the poet before
allegedly confusing “Idoménée” with
“Idumée.” Here again, the rime prevails: (mis)lead by vowel
sounds the poet complicitly reminds his reader that “where paronomasia
begins, there may be mirage” (SP 210). In an intricately staged confusion
resulting from his unleashed demon of homophony, Duncan follows the trails of
his initial bafflement from Ida to Idomeneus and finally Idumea. Woven together,
these musings make up Duncan’s “child of an Idumaean night,”
that is his poem, which he re-christens “the phantom begotten of Idumaean
Night” in his transfiguration of the original (GW 156). Mallarmé
paraphrases the gist of the poem’s origin in a letter to Mme Le Josne
dated 8 February 1866, relating that his sonnet evokes “the sadness of the
Poet before the child of his Night, the poem of his illuminated wake, when
wicked Dawn shows it is only funereal and lifeless: he brings it over to the
woman who will vivify it!” (OC I: 691, my translation). The lifeless
offspring of Mallarmé’s nightly labor is his long poem
Hérodiade — from Herod, who was a native of Idumea (or the Land of
Edom in the Hebrew Bible)–, which he is already working on in November
1865 at the time when the “Gift” was written. Published as late as
in 1883 in Verlaine’s “Poètes maudits,” the
poem’s title went through a series of transformations, from “Le
Jour” to “Le Poëme nocturne,” “Dédicace du
Poëme nocturne” and finally “Don du poëme.”
[16]

While Mallarmé’s
“Don” is only partly and partially translated in
“Interlude” (cf. GW 156), Duncan’s recording of his puzzlement
informs the greater part of the derivation: “such is the Demon of the
Psychopathology of Daily Life” (GW 155). He thus returns to Freud, whose
reading of interferences as meaningful insights arguably inspired the
“poetic disturbances” configured in “An Interlude” as
well as the compelling sentence concluding his introductory essay to Bending the
Bow:

29

For these discords, these imperatives of the poem that
exceed our proprieties, these interferences — as if the real voice of the
poet might render unrecognizable to our sympathies the voice we wanted to be
real, these even artful, willful or, it seems to us, affected, psychopathologies
of daily life, touch upon the living center where there is no composure but a
life-spring of dissatisfaction in all orders from which the restless ordering of
our poetry comes. (BB x)

30

Enmeshed in this inmixing of allusions is
also Mallarmé’s prose poem “The Demon of Analogy,”
which in turn winks at Poe’s “Imp of Perversity,” a poem known
to French readers in Baudelaire’s translation as “Le Démon de
la perversité” (cf. OC I: 1335). Although Duncan resents “the
curious insistent old woman,/ignorant Muse” for leading him “to
mis-take, to mis-/ understand” (157) the abstruse reference, she is above
all “the facilitator for the rest of the poem” (Davidson 176).
Whereas Nerval’s in-fluence remained subterrean,
“Mallarmé’s creative malaise,” soon mirrored in Duncan
contingent poiesis, pervades the poem’s ground. This foregrounding not
only discloses the original source in a way reminiscient of the ontological
status of truth as aletheia (unconcealedness), but it also opens the poem to the
in-cident of “foreign matter”:

31

[ Swiftly, this
foreign matter comes into the emptiness of Idumaean Night,
name
mistaken for name, person in place of person, the child-Zeus, the
father-Idomeneo, the two Minoan princes come forward to fill
the blank I
drew for the matter of Edom.]
(GW 155)

32

Commenting on this poem in Ghostlier Demarcations, Michael Davidson depicts the
writing process as the inclusion of “the ‘foreign matter’ of
contingency,” as well as the irruption in the poem of the “marginal
material” comprised of various “etymological and philological
speculations” (176-177). Complementing Davidson’s take on textual
and sexual politics of marginality, I would further argue that the key to this
poem lies in the embedded geneses of hypertext and hypotext. In choosing to
incorporate the Pléiade’s editorial commentary of
Mallarmé’s impossible – hence gruesome – gift into his
poem, Duncan grounds the endogenesis of the Idumaean “Gift” into the
exogenesis of his own text.[17]

33

[ So
at last the poem returnd to the Don du Poème where I found
in the notes to the Pleiade edition Denis Saurat’s
commentary which tells us that Idumée is the land of
Esau, Edom, and that the Kabbala relates that Esau and the
kings of Edom (Zeus, then, and the kings of Crete) were
pre-Adamic, presexual, reproducing themselves without male or
female, not being in the image of God. “Le poète
fait son poème seul, sans femme,” Saurat tells us,
“comme un roi d’Idumée, monstrueuse naissance.”]
(GW 156)

34

Duncan’s
partly rewritten translation of Denis Saurat’s “La Nuit
d’Idumée” (NRF, 1931) quoted in the first Pléiade
paratextual notes (OC 1945: 1437) appears immediately before the passage
underlied by Mallarmé’s gift. In the passage from
Mallarmé’s Idumaean night to Duncan’s transfigured night, the
“Don” is turned into a “spectrographic” poem: “the
phantom begotten of Idumaean night” (GW 156). In Given Time, where one of
the key texts is precisely Mallarmé’s “Don,” Jacques
Derrida contends that the gift is the “figure of the impossible”:

35

If there is gift, the given of the gift [...] must
not come back to the giving [...]. If the figure of the circle is
essential to economics, the gift must remain aneconomic. [...] It
is perhaps in this sense that the gift is the impossible. Not impossible but the
impossible. The very figure of the impossible. (GT 7)

36

About
“Don du poème,” Derrida observes that “like its
dedication, which gives itself by giving nothing other than the gift in question
with no possible oversight of that performance, this ‘Gift of the
Poem’ would be as the gift itself, enacted; [...] the kings
of Idumea were supposed to reproduce themselves without sex and without
woman” (GT 58).

37

The poem is compared to a work that would
have been born from the poet alone [...]. ‘Horrible
naissance,’ says ‘Don du poème,’ a birth in which the
child, that is, the poem, finds itself thus given, confided, offered — to
the reader to whom it is dedicated, to its adressee [...] but by
the same token to [his wife] who in her turn, in exchange, will
give it the breast [to breast feed, donner le sein]. (GT
59)

38

Because it is haunted by the ghost of the Mallarmean
poem’s ghastly birth, Duncan’s “Inter-lude” grows in the
between of the intertext, here relayed by the “Demon of Incident.”
“The Demon of Incident” appears in another Mallarmean
“Passage” titled “Jamais” (GW 151), written after the
celebrated, but much dreaded, throw of the dice (“Un coup de Dés
jamais n’abolira le Hasard,” OC I: 367). In his insightful article entitled “Late Duncan: From Poetry to Scripture,” Norman Finkelstein emphasizes that Duncan substitutes a meaning-charged “IT” for Mallarmean chance:

39

For Mallarmé, the poet has no choice but to risk meaninglessness; every poem he writes is a throw of the dice. But for Duncan, the return to the Void is a return to the source of meaning. That meaning is ultimately inexpressible, but it is there nevertheless. […] If for Mallarmé a throw of the dice will never abolish chance, then for Duncan, no throw of the dice can abolish “IT”, his term […] for the Numen or Source of meaning that exists beyond the world of chance. (357)

40

“Jamais” is a tribute to Zukofsky’s “lucidity”, and it stems from Duncan’s disbelief or mistrust of chance, in life and as a meaning-producing writing procedure. Duncan shares with Zukofsky and Wittgenstein a mystic conception of language as a form of life, and poems as life forms of an essentially organic language.

5. “Baudelaire’s Terrible Ennuie”

41

In his letter to Chris Edwards from May 30 1978, Duncan makes this statement:

42

Artaud
is a crisis in the discourse.
But Rimbaud is a crisis in poetry.
Baudelaire I take to be the ground in which the trouble is at work. And there I
am determined to stay (going no further in reading than I can learn by heart),
learn my waters before I take soundings up stream or down
stream.

43

Duncan’s use of Baudelaire’s underwriting takes
many forms. Be they in the guise of the proper name or poem titles, translations
and quotations, the “Baudelairean words” are scattered around Ground
Work. Some lines from Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) become classical inserts making up the
richly-encrusted materia poetica: they form insightful probes into the
poem’s genetic ground but they do not act as the “major mover”
of writing. Take for instance “Toward His Malaise” from the series
“To Master Baudelaire” (GW 199):

44

upon the edge of what
we never knew then
you made clear was there
in
the human condition — your Ennui

plus laid, plus méchant, plus immonde,

that we would never have come to,
yet
in the depths of Poetry
I have so long ever gone to and
ever
returnd myself from, beyond

45

In this poem,
Duncan slightly modifies the Ur-text drawn from Baudelaire’s famous
address to his “hypocrite
lecteur”[18] and adapts it to
his addressee. Baudelaire’s spleen — his sickness of living, springing
from a sense of infinite boredom blended with malaise (un-ease or
dis-ease) — resurfaces in the last verses of “In Blood’s
Domaine” along with a scattered stanza from the poem
“L’Horloge” (“The Clock”), which tolls for the
ill-starred poet approaching “Death’s
customs.”[19] As put admirably
in Michael Palmer’s new introduction to the combined edition of
Ground Work (also in Jacket 29):

46

“To Master Baudelaire”
establishes the tone of malaise and infection that will prevail in much of what
follows. [...] We are in the full atmosphere of Baudelaire’s
“spleen.” He will reappear in one of the darkest and strangest of
the Passages, “In Blood’s Domaine,” where the “Angel
Syphilis” and the “Angel Cancer” preside over “the
undoing of Mind’s rule in the brain” and where “cells of lives
within life conspire.” We have arrived at the heart of darkness, where
Form has been infected by “scarlet eruptions,” and where another
language prevails.

What Angel,
what
Gift of the Poem,
has brought into my body
this
sickness of living?
Into the very Gloria of Life’s theme and
variations
my own counterpart of Baudelaire’s
terrible Ennuie?
(GW 251).

49

The feminized supreme scourge
of modernity — Ennuie — takes on the value of a feminine allegory.
Furthermore Duncan’s repeated use of the added mute “e”
throughout the manuscripts may be pointing to the unstable or undecidable sexual
identity of the Ennui — the evil within the self or the figure of a daemonic Other.
The unsounded (and unsound) letter “e” is also the sign of the
primacy of the graphemic over the phonemic in this instance, where the
“e” ending Baudelair-e and terribl-e contaminates the
self-blossoming flower of
Ennuie.[20] Depicted as a syphilitic
angel of modernity, Baudelaire indeed contaminates the whole final volume of
Duncan’s poetry. He is one of the “Signators” underwriting the
work. Duncan confides: “each day I secure the meaning/of my name in
yours” (GW 204).

50

Published in Roots and Branches, “After
a Passage in Baudelaire” is a riff off “Fusées XXII”
(OC I: 663) that prepared the groundwork for “Quand le Grand Foyer Descend
dans les Eaux” (GW 248), which will be focused on (the italics are
Duncan’s; I emphasize the translated fragments of hypertext in bold):

51

QUAND LE GRAND FOYER DESCEND DANS LES EAUX [Passages]

“His attempted suicide seemd
to purge his nature of depression and despair”

having to do with spelling, with error, with words. . . .La scène monte et . . . what is today's beauty?
this wetting of the world tearful
and into leaf-flame flares -rocks, trees-mélange de principes dreams also of this order
letting go into a lovely litterelle s'épanouit en tons mélangés
Narcissus alone comes to seeles arbres, les rochers
his face destitute in beautyles granits se mirent dans les eaux . . .
based on other functions a music still
water means to reflect
rain drops interrupt the mirror . . . y déposent
bare in winter cold face in summer clothedleurs reflets
into shadow close
the poem mounts toward a stem in time
staring down into its foliage

the sap rises to see
it's Death lingering mine
(returning to Baudelaire)
he is staring down into his book
looking at what he has written just now

the entire passage has to do with color

the thought of suicide before

takes on light and shade near and far a

way. The eye
dwells on the horizon.

52

This Passage takes its cue from
Baudelaire’s “On Colour,” a dazzling critical essay published
with his writings on the 1846 Salon. Like the poems grounded in intertextuality
involving Nerval and Mallarmé, Duncan’s “Foyer”
consists in a transfiguration of the original text, the presence of which
remains undisclosed, as its fragments are interlaced with and translated into
the original passages. I emphasized with italics the fragments that are quoted
verbatim in Duncan’s “Foyer,” while I wrote in bold type the
passages that are (loosely) translated and absorbed in Duncan’s
Passage.

Ariadne’s thread runs secretly through the Nerval,
Baudelaire and Mallarmé derivations. Duncan’s transfiguration of
Nerval’s extatic depiction of the interplay of light during the
“whole scene of the evening ceremony” over the stricken temple of
Isis is inoculated into the Baudelaire Passage by means of paronomasia (Poundian error? Pun on the Seine? Probably both): the rising sap (sève) in the essay on color is blended
with the scene (scène) of the Nervalian
sunset.[21] Immediately following
“What is Romanticism?” appears the French poet’s astonishing
analysis of color and light in open space, where “all things, changed
second by second by the displacement of shade and light, [...] are in perpetual
vibration,” before they unleash a visual feast at sunset, “when the
great hearth descends upon the waters” (OC II: 423). This circulation of
the light and of sap, the transformation of golden nuances into red-blood at
sunset, offers another underlying connection through the word foyer, which means
metonymically the fire of the brazing sun, the hearth of the fire-place, and the
household or home. It is connected with the impossible economy of the gift, from
oikos (“home, property, family, the hearth, the fire indoors”) and
nomos (“law”), which “implies the idea of exchange, of
circulation, of return” (Derrida GT 6). Moreover, this anticipates
Duncan’s fascination with Jabès’s demeure in
(“foreign”) language. In “An Eros/Amor/Love Cycle,”
Duncan writes: “This foyer — this language — burns within
language” (GW 223). Between foyer and foreign, Duncan’s elected
asylum is the threshold (seuil). This distinclty Jabèsian word is not
unlike Duncan’s open and transient poetic locus, the
passage.

55

Duncan’s movement of writing is not driven by a
teleological aim, or an urge to “make it cohere” (C 116: 816), but,
rather one “to copy this palimpsest” (C 116: 817). This movement is
taken in the double-bind of witnessing its continual, processual birth, a
movement forward, and the undercurrents of a drive toward the archè, the
origin. The works’ genetic bedrock not only lays the groundwork for the
poems but also encapsulates Duncan’s metamorphic poetics. Further, I wish
to suggest that some of the notebooks could be regarded as a work with a
plasticity of its own. And conversely, the published poems (the conventional
literary product) ought still to be read as notebooks, as a groundwork for an
illusory Book to come. Duncan’s late writings take “place” on
an unfathomable ground, that of the archè and the archive. Duncan writes in 1980 in NB 66:

In the heightened awareness of the spelling present in letters
along with the evocation present in phonemes and with the casting of what we
call meaning, image, content, concept in the semiotic fabric[,] we lose
ourselves in the work. The intellect is drawn into the net, lured by the flame,
so that the poem is written over an abyss.

Duncan’s
radically open form is predicated upon a dual practice of reading writings and
writing readings, involving what I described as “genreading” and
“underwriting.” In Ground Work especially, but not only,
Duncan designed the corpus of a unique “genreader” among the poets
of his generation. Evolving a genetic-based poetics of derivation (of which
“An Interlude of Winter Light” certainly is one of the best
examples), Duncan foregrounds a writing process anchored in the layering of
countless readings and re-readings of master or hyper- texts that in turn
underwrite the “grand collage” (BB vii).Finely woven
together, the myriad prose and verse scribblings produce – from the
heretic margins of modernism itself – one of the most challenging (and
rewarding) collages of postwar American poetry.

Notes

[1] All quotations in this sentence
were drawn from Robert Duncan, letter to Chris Edwards, 28 April 1977
(http://jacketmagazine.com/28/dunc-edwa-lett.html),
the Robert Duncan Archive, The Poetry Collection, University at Buffalo, The
State University of New York. I wish to thank Robert J. Bertholf, James Maynard and Michael Basinski for their expertise and invaluable help at The Poetry Collection. This article originated as a paper for last year’s “(Re:)Working the Ground: A Conference on the Late Writings of Robert Duncan” organized by The Poetry Collection (see Jacket 28). I will refer throughout this essay to
Duncan’s notebooks (NB) as numbered in the Buffalo archive. See also
Robert Duncan, “Son écrit d’un texte parlé”
[Written Sound of a Spoken Text], in Le Récit et sa
représentation: Colloque de Saint-Hubert, 5–8 mai 1977. Ed. Roger
Dadoun. Paris: Payot, 1978: 65–69.

[2] In a notebook Duncan
drops a scornful hint at “the ‘school’ of dear diary
poetry” (NB 49), now notoriously labelled School of Quietude by Ron
Silliman.

[3] In his essay
entitled “Joyce’s late Modernism and the birth of the genetic
reader” Jean-Michel Rabaté writes: “The differences between
two critical ‘industries’ of Modernism, the Pound and Joyce schools,
can exemplify important variations in the emergence of a new genetic Modernism,
the discovery of an original type of reading practice linked with a renewed
attention to textual materiality. Joyce and Pound appear exemplary in that they
enact two aspects of the typically Modernist strategy that forces critics to
take the act of reading and writing into account, and to become alert to
historical modes of textualization” (JJ 194). Rabaté moves
on to his definition of the “genreader”: “My further
contention is that this ideal reader will become a ‘genetic’ reader,
or in another sense a generic reader, both engendered by the text and
engendering the text” (JJ 196).

[3a] In the introduction to her
translation of Der Satz vom Grund (comprised of the Freiburg lectures
from 1956-57 and the eponymous conference),Reginald Lilly explores the
polysemy of Satz and Grund in Heidegger’s text (The
Principle of Reason, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991):
“Der Satz vom Grund could be translated as The Principle of
Ground(s), The Leap of Reason, The Leap from Reason, The
Leap of Ground, The Leap from Ground(s), The Sentence of
Reason, The Principle of Ground/Reason, as well as others”
(xiii). On the interpretation of Satz as “leap,” or
“start, jump weg vomGrund [away from reason]” (202,
my translation), cf. Jean Grondin, “Heidegger et le problème
de la métaphysique,” DIOTI 6 (1999): 163-204.

[4] The “question of the
meaning of being” was naturally first formulated in the
“Introduction” to Being and Time. It is worth noting that the
polysemy of “ground” partly overlaps with that of logos,
literally translated as speech, and “interpreted” variously as
“reason, judgment, concept, definition, ground, relation” (BT
32).

[5] Heidegger is seldom
discussed in Duncan’s essays and notes if compared with thinkers such as
Heraclitus, Plato, Freud or Whitehead. However the poet’s January 1971
Prospectus,anticipating the release of the instalments
Preparing The Ground Work, is suffused with the relation of poetry and
language to the question of “being.” I will merely point out here
that this letter is not a marginal sign of interest in (and potential conflict
with) Heidegger. The George Oppen papers (namely his correspondance and
notebooks) also testify to Duncan’s struggle with Heidegger’s
writings. So do comments by Michael McClure, Michael Palmer and John Taggart.
Reading notes from Existence and Being (1949) and Being and Time
December 26, 1969 (NB 62) and June and July 1974 (NB 51) are to be found in the
notebooks.

[5a] Here is Heidegger’s critique of Nietzsche’s nihilism: “But being remains unfindable, almost like nothing, or ultimately quite so. Then, in the end, the word ‘being’ is no more than an empty word. It means nothing real, tangible, material. Its meaning is an unreal vapor. Thus in the last analysis Nietzsche was perfectly right in calling such ‘highest concepts’ as being ‘the last cloudy streak of evaporating reality’ [Twilight of Idols]” (IM Manheim 35). Heidegger proceeds: “Nietzsche’s judgment, to be sure, was meant in a purely disparaging sense” (39), before concluding that “[u]ltimately what matters is not that the word ‘being’ remains a mere sound and its meaning a vapor, but that we have fallen away from what this word says” (40).

[7] The status of
Duncan’s “The Chimeras” (as translations and integrated
in the poet’s “works”) is ambivalent for the series was first
republished in a book of poems (Bending the Bow, 1968), and, more
recently in a paperback translation of the selected works of Gérard de
Nerval, Aurelia & Other Writings [A]. Trans. Geoffrey Wagner,
Robert Duncan and Marc Lowenthal. Boston: Exact Change, 1996.

[8] “Any religion which
succeeds another respects for a long time certain practices and forms of the
cult, which it merely harmonizes with its own dogma. In this way the Greeks
modified and translated the ancient theogony of the Egyptians and Pelasgians,
adorning it with new names and attributes [...]. But look at how many
easy assimilations Christianity had found in these rapid transformations of the
most diverse dogmas!” (A 139, my
emphasis).

[9] On the irony see
Béguin and Richer in the first Pléiade edition (OC 1966 I:
1282 n. 1).

[10] Cf. OC III: 618. On the architectural/architextual trope in Duncan’s poetry,
see Collis (2002) and my own “Les constructions poétiques de Robert
Duncan: ‘passages of a poetry, no more’”
(2005).

[13] See Mark
Rudman’s New York Times review of Ground Work: Before the
War (1984) published on 6 April 1985, which ended with a quotation drawn
from the last section of Duncan’s “Passages 32”
(“Child of a century...”), chosen for evidence of Duncan’s
idiosyncratic style. This mishap is nonetheless thought-provoking since it not
only shows that the reviewer was unwittingly quoting a quote, but more
importantly, that the Nervalian subtext was seamlessly absorbed into the
newly-written derivation.

[15] The title “Pli
selon pli” (taken up by the Deleuzian (ex)plication of the monad-fold) was
the original title of a memorial lecture that Mallarmé gave in Bruges in
1890 as a tribute to Villier de l’Isle-Adam, and which became the fourth
line of a poem remembering the event entitled “Remémoration d'amis
belges” (“Remembrance of Belgian Friends”). The poem describes
the brightening mist as it disperses gradually to reveal the architecture of the
city of Bruges, and figuratively, the topology of an imagined space (OC
I: 32; see CP 53):

[16] Michael
Riffaterre points out that Mallarmé’s “Don” pertains to
the genre of “the dedicatory epistle,” a genre in which “the
dedication must mention the title of that text.” “In
Mallarmé’s poem,” proceeds Riffaterre, “this rule
generates the first line; but instead of simply the title,
Hérodiade, we get the periphrasis l’enfant d’une
nuit d’Idumée. Here l’enfant refers to both a
character born in the country of Edom and to a poem about this character
composed during the night” (154-155).

[17] Pierre-Marc de Biasi
depicts textual endogenesis as “the scriptuary processes focusing upon the
production of writing by itself,” “the self-referential dimension of
a work where the pre-textual matter [matière avant-textuelle]
transforms itself by tapping on the ressources of writing” and
“transfigures the avant-textual matter without resorting to external
documents.” In contrast, “textual exogenesis designates any writing
process devoted to research work, selection and integration involving
information derived from sources outside writing” (PCG 45-46, my
translation).

[20]Ennuie exists as a verbal form (as in je m’ennuie, I am
bored), and the form may have stuck in Duncan’s memory. However, the
mistake was never made with “your Ennui” (GW 199),
which would corroborate the possibility of a graphemic contamination and
hypothetical feminization also linked to the figure of the circle (from e
to e).